


rage against the dying of the light

by Flora_Obsidian



Series: found families [14]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Espionage, Families of Choice, Gen, Spying, Stormtrooper Culture, Stormtrooper Rebellion, idk why that last one's a tag but it works so i'm taking it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-02-26 15:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13238217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flora_Obsidian/pseuds/Flora_Obsidian
Summary: No one asks Leia Organa about her children, not anymore. They know what has happened to her son, after all, to her family. No one asks Leia Organa about her children; why would they? She only has the one.One in blood. More in spirit.In the early days of the Resistance, before it all went from bad to worse, Leia takes a young refugee under her wing. A girl with the Force, brimming with anger-- very much like Leia herself, at that age, in truth. And as the First Order rises to power, and the Resistance struggles to keep pace, she finds that she may yet lose another child to the First Order -- the girl has volunteered to spy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE WE A R E
> 
> Happy 2018, folks. Punch some fascists in the face. Be unapologetically you. Write that thing that you've been planning on writing _literally_ since TFA came out, but are only getting around to it two and a half years later.
> 
> (coughs) anyway. Here is the kinda-direct sequel to _i, rebel_ \-- direct in the sense that that one is going to tie into this one eventually, but only kinda in that this starts out seventeen years before TFA takes place. Just bear with me, it'll be worth it. We'll be following the character Jania, mentioned by Leia as the Resistance spy who helped Em-Kay and her kids get out, so if you've been wondering at all about that random Force-sensitive character who showed up several chapters back and disappeared again into the shadows, your time to wait is over.
> 
> Thank you all for being patient with me between the end of _i, rebel_ and the start of this one here. I got to recharge over winter break, and while college is going to drain me pretty quick (creative writing classes are awaiting, ready to suck up my inspiration for fic and my time in which to write it) I have a portion of this pre-written and more of it plotted out. Updates will hopefully be semi-regular.
> 
> Also, although I feel like this goes without saying by now, **this series does not consider the events of _The Last Jedi_ canon**. I might borrow bits and pieces out of it for inspiration or whatnot, but canon has been left behind in a galaxy far, far away. Additionally, **the new Expanded Universe is not considered canon for this 'verse**. Again, I might borrow bits and pieces -- I'm doing that with Legends a whole heck of a lot even in this first chapter -- but it's not canon for this 'verse. Just what's on-screen in TFA, and nothing more.
> 
> Enough of me talking, now. Onto the chapter!

General Leia Organa is the second-strongest woman that Jania has ever met in her admittedly short life. _Second_ -strongest – first, to most, but Jania remembers the raid on her home, the unabashed destruction. Her own mother had stood hand in hand with her father to give Jania time to run, and run she had. Run all the way to what a handful of people are calling _resistance_ , when higher-ups and politicians refuse to acknowledge the growing threat that the First Order poses.

Jania _knows_ what kind of threat the First Order is. Has seen it, firsthand.

But even here, in a group of people who recognize such things, who have seen the brutality of stormtroopers and those who have crawled from the ashes of the Empire like a dark phoenix, reborn-- even here, she finds herself restless. Empty. Lonely. She has nothing, having moved from a shuttle of refugees to bartered passage to someone who knew someone else who could put her on a shuttle to this fledgling group of resistors. She is young and lost and angry.

She closes her eyes at night, and the world around her is nothing but fire.

* * *

General Leia Organa is the second-strongest woman that Jania has ever met in her admittedly short life. She knows this, because the longer she spends in this ramshackle group of fighters, the more she gets to watch people around her. The more she gets to _learn_.

Chiss, as a rule, do not leave Csilla. The Ascendancy guards their portion of space, and Jania's people keep to themselves. Even Mitth'raw'nuruodo, outlier though he was, never betrayed the location of their homeworld in his service to the Empire – but he lived past the Empire's fall, and others found him in the end. The First Order burned Csilia as it burned so many worlds before it, and it continues to burn more still; the Empire fell at Endor, yes, and then it creaked and groaned and staggered its way back to its feet under new leadership. Chiss do not leave Csilla, do not leave their portion of space – Jania knows little of others, and they, little of her. She watches. She learns.

She thinks of the First Order, and she closes her eyes at night and sees a world of ice on fire, and she thinks, given the chance, she will kill every officer who ordered her planet raided and her home burned and her people taken and enslaved. But right now she does not have that chance, and so she throws herself into this group of resistors in the hopes that someday she might.

She watches. She learns.

General Organa is the one who keeps this mismatched group together, that much is obvious from the outset. She is their figurehead, their idol, their living legend. A rallying point. But there's more than that, lurking underneath the surface, something _more_ than just reverence in the way everyone treats her. Jania doesn't ask outright-- she does not trust anyone, not since the Ascendancy allied itself with the First Order and told their people they would be left alone, for the First Order had promised such in their treaties. She sees no reason why anyone would answer her honestly, especially when she asks about this tangible _something_ that she still cannot name.

“I only know legends,” she says, and she swaps stories of a life-that-was. Things that do not hurt as much to think about as the rest of it. The color of Csilla's glaciers, and the bite of the air and the vast expanse of the sky, and the smooth walls of the underground cities, tunnels carved through precious gems, sparkling amethyst and glittering diamond. Those things are not _gone_ , after all. The First Order does not have another Death Star. Her people are beaten, subservient, and many of the tunnels collapsed, and there were entire walls of ice melted and misshapen from heat, refrozen, streaked with red---- but the glaciers are not gone. The skies are not gone. The gems, some of them, maybe, but the First Order doesn't mean to strip mine the Ascendancy, she thinks. She hopes.

“I hear they called her Huttslayer,” she says, and pilots with lined faces and grizzled beards tell her of the days of the Rebellion of old, take the truths out of the legends and make them _real_.

“They told us she is a Jedi,” she says, and she finds out that it is General Organa's twin who is the Jedi, training children at the old Rebellion base on Yavin IV. General Organa _has_ the Force, of course she does-- just as strong as her brother, in her own way, and stronger still in others.

"They told us she is the daughter of--" she starts, and finds herself quickly admonished. General Organa is the daughter of Bail and Breha (and Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, the whole galaxy knows of this and anyone who respects her will let old ghosts lie).

“But listen, now,” one pilot tells her, when they're done swapping stories and Jania has built a slightly better picture of this figurehead, this woman even _she_ had heard of on Csilla, where they all kept to themselves. There's something intense in his eyes, far more serious than the conversation leading up to it had been. “Listen, kid. She's our general, understand? Our princess. Always has been. And all this, that you've been asking about-- public knowledge, really, but you don't go bothering _her_ about it. Ask all the questions you want, kid, but you respect what she's been through. You respect her, got that?”

For a moment, more on impulse than anything, Jania bristles at the term _kid_. She's only lived fifteen standard years, and in the eyes of most species, that _does_ make her a kid, fine-- but on Csilla, she'd be almost a year into adulthood. If nothing else, what she sees when she closes her eyes, what she _remembers_ \---

But the meaning in his words is right behind all of that, and she calms herself. General Organa is a living legend. A rallying point. And while the truth is hard to distinguish from the legend, even now, Jania isn't an idiot. The woman has been through a lot in one lifetime, and she can – and _will_ – respect that. Of course she will.

Even on Csilla, they knew of Alderaan.

* * *

Jania closes her eyes at night and sees a world on fire, and so she wanders when she cannot sleep. She doesn't expect to wander into the woman she has become-- not obsessed with, that isn't the word she wants, the only thing of hers she might call an _obsession_ is the hatred inside of her for the First Order, and she will burn it to the _ground_ \---- fascinated by, perhaps.

But she finds General Organa in one of the old, empty towers the base at D'Qar contains, a place that Jania goes to marvel at all the green and look at the stars at night, and she makes a startled sound when she sees the figure silhouetted in the moonlight.

The General turns, and she smiles faintly. “It's a nice tower for finding some space to think, isn't it? Don't let me stop you. I promise I'll be quiet.”

It's humor in a sense, but Jania isn't quite sure how to go about processing it. She shuffles on her feet. “I don't want to disturb you. I can leave.”

“No, there's no need. Really.” A crooked smile, now, on a face only just starting to show the age of the years it has seen. She gestures around the empty floor and open air as if to emphasize the amount of room they have to ignore one another. “It's Jania, isn't it?”

“Y—Yes. Ma'am.” She shuffles a little more before ruthlessly squashing down the urge. “How?”

“Not many people manage to gain the trust of others in such a way that they can barter passage to a secret base-- and I keep track of personnel, here. There aren't too many.”

“Oh.” It had been difficult to find her way here, following whispers and legends like that of what she knows of the woman before her, but she hadn't thought that her effort would give her any notice. Hesitantly, Jania shuffles forward, just a couple of steps. “It's. Ssej'ania'lliadi, ma'am. Most people can't say the L's right, though.”

The smile softens, ever so slightly. “Do you prefer it to Jania?”

Her mother and father called her Jania. Friends. Family. On Csilla, only friends and family got that honor, and the more formal full name used in any other setting. No one else will ever have the trust she held in them, but keeping the name that they gave her helps keep them alive, in the only way that she can manage past the memories she holds; she cannot bring _their_ names to pass her lips before she wants to start to cry. But she doesn't say that. _Jania_ carries a familiarity she no longer has with anyone; _Ssej'ania'lliadi_ carries all the legacy of the family that no longer exists. Not _her_ family. Mother, father, siblings, cousins---

\--hearing the first is good. Hearing the second, mispronounced and mangled, is better than never hearing it again at all, and also good.

“I... don't mind either, ma'am.”

“Just Leia,” the General corrects, and Jania finds the urge to start shuffling manifests itself as a twitch. One does not call a legend by a first name. Then: “Ssej'ania'lliadi.”

It... sounds right. Like someone from home is calling her name. She has said nothing of family, and yet feels the need to cry regardless.

 _No_.

Her tears will not bring them back.

“Yes. Like... that.”

She looks at the General a little more closely, then. She expects people who are in charge of things to have a greater focus on the bigger picture, not to take the time out of their hectic days to speak with someone they do not know. A single speck of color, in that big picture. She does not expect this woman to know her name, to speak with her as an equal, to _listen_.

She looks at the General, and she sees two images layered strangely over one another, both of them very much real despite the impossibility of it. A white dress as opposed to weathered blue, and hair less gray in different braids, and a face close to a decade younger with the same weight of years behind it all. And then she blinks, and the image is gone, and all she sees is a woman in her forties, silhouetted in moonlight, looking back at her curiously. She’s been staring for too long and seeing nothing.

Embarrassed, flushing a darker blue, she ducks her head and goes to stand looking out at the base below; the General turns away a few moments later, and they share in the quiet of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Legends canon re: the Chiss is something deeply important to you, I really am sorry if I butchered it. Just a humble fic writer, doing my best over here.
> 
> Updates for the ffv's _not_ relevant to this fic include the following:  
>  \--I will have a story with Lando in it. There's half of a word doc sitting in the folder with everything else for this 'verse where he shows up _and I am going to finish it if it kills me_  
>  \--the Rey/Poe/Finn origins story is also still the works and undergoing completion  
> \--future oneshots include Skywalker family bonding time and vignettes of life at the Temple on Yavin and, _of course_ , more Ghost Shenanigans  
> \--the next multi-chapter fic in this series is likely going to be _trick of the light_ , wherein the ghost of Anakin Skywalker forcibly drags his wayward grandchild on a roadtrip of redemption across the galaxy. there is a long and consequence-filled road ahead.
> 
> Again, thank you all for being patient with me, and I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of the ffv's latest installment. To find me, rambling about writing and whatnot, you can follow me on Tumblr @floraobsidian -- feel free to ask questions over there, too!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Poe Dameron appears several chapters earlier than was expected in the first outline of the story and immediately puts his foot in his mouth.

Things spiral quickly from there – quickly, and in such a way that Jania doesn’t even notice the changes until much later, which _scares_ her (though she won’t admit it aloud to anyone). She doesn’t mean to seek out the General’s time, and she doesn’t mean to keep running into the woman, and she doesn’t mean to keep having conversations with her that turn from politely casual to curious to-- friendly, perhaps. She learns more about General Organa _from_ General Organa than she’s learned from anybody else in past months and years.

...And in a way, it stands to reason that as she throws everything she has into this group of resistors, this _resistance_ , that she would come into contact more often with the woman holding them all together.

Mostly, it hits her when she’s sitting down at a desk instead of a drafty, empty parapet, for conversation and _tea_ instead of unexpected conversation, and realizes that this has become something routine. It startles her so much that she nearly spills her cup, and the General looks at her curiously. “Are you all right, Jania?”

“Fine, ma’am,” she answers, and the curious look turns rather exasperated. Fondly exasperated.

“How many times, Jania!” she says, mock-sternly, and Jania dares to smile in response. They are-- friends, now, perhaps, but she is also _General Organa_. She deserves the honorific.

“If you insist, ma’am.”

The General’s expression breaks into a smile of her own-- and Jania sees an overlay of images, occupying the same space, both of them real but only one of them _here_. She mostly ignores it, the same way that she’s done since the first time. She has her suspicions, but regardless, it isn’t hurting her, and she has more important goals. Drink her tea. Destroy the First Order. Etc.

The stories of others helped her to separate the truth from the legend of the woman before her, but Jania has learned from General Organa herself about the little things that make up a life. She has a husband who is a general like herself, though he spends far less time acting the part and far more time traveling, trying to fill an insatiable wanderlust. He sends comms, and recorded holomessages, and such, never from the same place twice. She has a son, who is a couple of years younger than Jania, and is training to be a Jedi with the New Order; her smile goes a little sad when she says this, and Jania doesn’t press for details.

And of course, she has a brother, who is training her son and half a dozen others. A sister-in-law in her brother’s wife. A niece, named Rey, just a few years old. The General has a holo of the three of them that sits on her desk, a man and a woman and a little toddler in the man’s arms.

They don’t look like legends. The General doesn’t look like a legend, either, though Jania is acutely aware of how far and wide the stories have spread every time they speak to one another, but… She thinks about it, later that night, half-asleep in her bunk. Should she have seen the General-- well, no, if she had seen the General on Csilla, she would have had many questions. Should she have seen the General in a crowd of others humans and humanoids, she would have thought her no different than the rest. Luke and Mara Jade and little Rey Skywalker look no different than anyone else.

“They look happy,” she says when the General first points out who they are, for want of anything else to say. In truth, she looks at them and sees a family, and she sees a family that she no longer has, and she finds herself falling back into that old familiar anger. Burn the First Order. Kill it. She must. She _will_.

...And she looks at them and sees a family, who is happy, and who has lost as much as she has. The Empire destroyed Alderaan and countless lives with it, and the First Order was born of the Empire and razed Csilla to snowmelt and empty caverns. She will destroy the First Order, and there will be no more families ripped apart.

“They are happy,” the General says fondly, but she says it while eyeing Jania a way that makes her wonder how much of her bitterness has shown on her face. She makes no qualms of hiding her anger towards the First Order and what they stand for around most, but she feels these conversations have turned into a reprieve for them both; she tucks her anger away here. “Ben dotes on his cousin.” She presses a button on the holodisc projecting its image above it, and it flickers over to a boy with dark hair and dark eyes and a gap-toothed smile. “He carries her all over the place, Luke says, and she won’t even go to sleep if he doesn’t say goodnight to her first.”

“...It’s good, that they’re happy,” Jania finally answers. She had no brothers or sisters, only a few older cousins, but her parents loved her and each other----

\--more than life itself.

* * *

“So what brings my favorite godson all the way out here?”

“Hey, I’m your _only_ godson, and half the time you’re telling me to get my head out of the clouds.”

The first voice is the General’s; the second is unfamiliar but filled with good humor, and Jania pauses in the middle of the hallway to listen to them. The General has mentioned a godson, living not too far from where her brother is training children to become the New Jedi Order, but she hadn’t mentioned anyone coming to visit. She hadn’t explained what a _godson_ was, either; the term doesn’t have a word in the native languages of the Chiss, and Jania needed to look it up after their conversation was over. A designated guardian, in case something should happen to a child’s parents.

It wouldn’t have mattered, if she’d had godparents. She had been pulled from her hideaway long after the First Order troops had marched through, and hurried onto a ship crammed tight with other refugees, and she hadn’t recognized a single one of them. She knows nothing of her cousins, or her friends, if they are alive or dead.

“Dad sent me out with the pilots Master Skywalker paid to ship the supplies you requested from the old base-- he wants you to convince me not to leave for school so I'm eligible to join the New Republic Fleet.” The voice doesn’t sound particularly concerned. Jania drops to fiddle with the ties on her boots as if the knots have come undone as the pair rounds the corner and into view-- the voice doesn’t seem to notice her. “I know-- I know _why_ he doesn’t, and you… you know. But I want to _do_ something, Leia.”

“I know, Poe. And I know that there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about talking you out of something once you’ve set your mind to it. But still, you're young yet, enjoy it while it lasts-- oh, have you met Jania?”

Caught out, Jania puts down the ties as though she’s just finished retying them and stands up. The second voice is a teen-- a boy, really, shorter than her, fluffy dark hair and bright eyes.

“Nope!” says the boy. “Came straight to find you. Hi-- Jania? I’ve never met a Chiss before, what’s your planet like?”

_Dead._

The General gets a nearly-worried expression, which, given that she’s spent a lifetime practicing politics from the stories that Jania has heard, is tantamount to panic. She doesn’t notice that, though, much too focused on not attacked a child. He’s a _child_. Just an idiot child. Breathe. Breathe. _Breathe_ \---

(Csilla, burning; her mother screaming for her to _run, get out, go_ , and a shuttle full of frightened cries and broken families; a home she will never see again)

“I don’t have time for questions, excuse me,” she says and walks away before she can say any more. Rage boils hot inside of her – not at the boy (idiot _foolish_ child), not quite – and she will burn the First Order to the ground if it _kills_ her, that is why she is here, why she came to find this Resistance, her planet is occupied and her family is gone and and _and_

and she finds herself at the top of an empty tower, where she and the General first met, looking at the sky as it turns from cerulean blue to shades of copper and yellow and indigo dark.

“Hey, um.”

She doesn’t need to listen to the boy. He is a boy, and rude, and tactless – and he is a boy. A child. Jania is an adult, by her people’s standards, and she has every right to walk away and ignore him completely. But he is a child _to the General_ , so she turns to look down at him coolly, impassive. She will listen, she will tolerate, and that is all anyone can expect of her. That is all she can give. She closes her eyes, and Csilla is burning.

She doesn’t know how long she has been standing here.

“I-- uh, messed up.” He shuffles on his feet, but he does meet her flat stare with his own nervous one. “Really bad. Leia explained, and said when she saw you again she’d tell you I didn’t mean it, but that’s different ‘cause it’s not _me_ saying it, and I thought I _should_ \-- and, um, I’m really good at rambling, bad habit, but I want to apologize, for that, ‘cause it was rude, and I didn’t know, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t apologize? So. I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, or make you think about things you didn’t want to.”

An honest mistake. She knew as much when he had first spoke, tactless child. But she hadn’t expected him to search her out – he’s out of breath, like he’s been walking for a long time. Rejecting it would be pointless – and so would continuing the conversation. “Apology accepted,” she replies, and turns back to regard the trees.

He doesn’t leave.

The boy is quiet, at least, for a little while after, and eventually she hears his footsteps shuffle a little closer; he stands next to her and looks out at the trees. Despite herself, she bristles.

He’s just a child.

“If you ever-- want to talk about it? I mean, just. Um. My mom dead, and it’s not the same thing, but talking to people, and, um. Talking about her, after. It helped, y’know?”

“You don’t _know_ me,” says Jania, more than a little incredulous. “I don’t know you.”

“You don’t have to talk to _me_ ,” the boy shrugs. “Just someone. Or no one, I mean. Up to you.” He doesn’t say anything else, and Jania doesn’t answer him, and after a while, he _does_ leave. She doesn’t see him again until a few days later, entirely by chance, as he’s lugging a duffel bag over one shoulder in the direction of the shipyards and the hangar bays.

“Leaving already?” she finds herself saying, and she finds him smiling at her for reasons she does not understand.

“Dad’s back on Yavin, and the pilots Master Skywalker sent are heading back to Yavin, too, so that’s where I’m going, and I’ve got some cool rocks that I found that I need to show my friend Ben. But I’ll probably be back in a few months! Less than a year. Maybe. Oh, here, and I found this one, I thought you might like it--” He shoves his hand deep into one of his pockets and pulls out an oval-shaped stone, then holds it out in the center of his palm. Jania blinks; it’s nothing impressive, nothing like the light trapped in glacial floes, the caverns gleaming with precious gems ---- oh, Csilla, _home_. But, it’s nice, in its plain kind of way, a dark shade of blue, nearly black, speckled with white. She takes it when the boy starts to fidget, and she realizes she’s been staring at him blankly while she thinks.

“...Thank you,” she says, and Poe grins again to hide that he doesn’t quite know how to act around her. He’s really just a boy, and this is a boy’s continued apology. “...Safe flights.”

“Uh-- yeah! Um, thanks, um-- bye, Jania!” he exclaims, and sprints off.

* * *

“My mother’s name was Juula,” she says the next time she and the General sit down to drink tea and talk about things unrelated to politics and resistance. “And my father’s name was Traal. We lived together in a city of thousands...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you all so much for reading! For more writing things and stuff about the found families 'verse, you can come find me on Tumblr @floraobsidian


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> College is trying to bury me in work, and so this chapter is later than I wanted it to be, but don't worry. We'll all get to the end of it eventually.
> 
> I don't like this chapter, but y'know, it's been a month.....??

<You’re angry today, pup>

Jania squints a little at the Wookie, who has appeared next to her with much more stealth than a creature that tall has any right to move with. The General’s husband’s closest friend, so the legends go – though the legends failed to mention anything about trash compactors, and as she watches Han Solo and Chewbacca argue over how to fix their bucket of bolts some several decades old, and as she watches the General roll her eyes fondly at their shenanigans, it becomes harder to reconcile the two things. They aren’t legends, only people. Living, fallible beings.

For all that she talks with the General, though, she speaks little with the other two, brief things in passing-- and the only reason she knows Shyriiwook to begin with is because one of the refugee ships she had been on had been mostly Wookies, with a Wookie pilot. They can’t speak Basic; it hurts their vocal cords in the same way that their language is impossible to manage by most humanoids, and so she had learned.

“...I’m an adult,” she replies at last, fumbling for any kind of response, caught off-guard. Chewbacca just huffs at her and tries to ruffle her hair. Proving that she most definitely is an adult, she hisses at him and tries to bat away a furry paw. She suspects he only stops to humor her.

<I’m two hundred and twenty of your years, pup, and not yet gray>

“I’m an adult, in my culture,” she repeats stubbornly, smoothing her hair back down. “And I’m not angry.” He doesn’t dignify that with any kind of a response at all, just looks at her. Jania narrows her eyes at him some more.

“...Fine. I’m always angry at the First Order, today isn’t any different.”

He huffs again, then gestures across the hangar bay. The infamous _Millennium Falcon_ is cordoned off, both of its pilots incredibly picky about who gets to go near it. <Come and fix some things, pup, it will calm you down>

“...Given how often I hear cursing coming from there, I doubt that.”

Chewbacca just barks out a laugh and pulls her after him, and there isn’t much of anything she can do when a Wookie decides she’s going to move. He pulls her up the ramp, and she wonders how the _hell_ it’s still flightworthy, and a box of tools is shoved into her arms. Solo looks at her suspiciously, and opens his mouth to say something, but the Wookie cuts him off before he can:

<She’s a found-child>

and Solo closes his mouth and gestures to an opened panel on the wall, with a tangle of multi-colored wires spilling out onto the floor in a heap.

At the end of the day, Jania’s ire is more focused on that damnable ship than on anything else, and she’s all but forgotten about that odd turn of phrase. Chewbacca ruffles her hair again before forcibly carting her off to the mess hall to get some food; she thinks she can hear Solo laughing to himself behind them as she leaves.

* * *

“You and Chewie get along then?” the General asks with the faintest of smiles. Jania shrugs a little bit and shifts in her chair. She still sees something double when she looks at the woman before her, sometimes, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. Ignore it, mostly; there are other things to focus on.

“He called me pup,” she says, with a touch of petulance that she doesn’t mean to let slip out, and the General’s smile grows.

“He calls everyone that,” the woman replies. “He calls _Han_ that, just to get a rise out of him.” She pauses, studying Jania for a moment. “Where did you learn to speak Shyriiwook?”

“…One of the refugee ships I was on. The pilot was Wookie, and so were a lot of the passengers. Kashyyk is a free world, now, but there’s still pockets where the Empire--”

She cuts herself off before she starts to raise her voice; and besides, the General is a politician when she isn’t building a covert resistance from scratch under the noses of her fellow politicians. She knows, even better than Jania, the state of galactic politics. The General hums, a little sadly, this time, and nods.

“There’s a bill meant to pass through the Senate in a few standard months,” she says, “that dedicates a portion of the budget for five galactic years to combating the slave trade. Luke’s going to be making a trip out to Hosnian Prime, even, to speak in its support, and he tries to keep himself out of politics, for the most part. Once it passes, we’ll have more worlds like Kashyyk – and far fewer refugee ships.”

It’s a turn Jania doesn’t expect the conversation to take, and she thinks about Csilla, as she so often does-- wonders, not for the first time, if the General thinks of Alderaan. If the hurt of it ever goes away. Then she pushes it aside, and clears her throat, and asks, “ _Once_ it passes?”

“Right now, it could go either way,” the General admits. “But-- well, there’s two reasons my brother tends to stay out of politics. The first is that he dislikes it and the people he has to deal with.” Her lips quirk slightly in a way that Jania can’t quite interpret. “The second is that he’s the face of the New Jedi Order and the son of the former Emperor’s successor, and he could have easily stepped into the power vacuum caused by the destruction of the second Death Star and taken power with only a couple of roadblocks. He didn’t, but he still has influence, and he does his best not to use it unless he absolutely has to.”

Jania hadn’t thought about it like that – the General rejects her heritage, and Jania has learned to dismiss it as well, but she forgets that the Jedi Skywalker openly embraces it. He bears his own legends.

“Oh,” she says. Then, "Huh."

“You’d like him, I think.” Now the General looks straight at her, and Jania can’t quite interpret the expression there, either. So, of course, she changes the topic.

“He called me a found-child?”

The General pauses. Then she smiles, and it’s a little sad and a little fond and a little bit of something else that she still can’t quite interpret.

“He always was in the habit of taking others under his wing, so to speak.” Then she laughs a little. “Has anyone ever mentioned to you how he and Han met?” Jania shakes her head. “If you tell him I said any of this – either of them, really – he’ll tell you that it’s because of a life-debt, but _really_ , Chewbacca took one look at Han and decided someone had to make sure he’d live to see thirty…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All always, thank you all for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the chapter. For more writerly things, come find me on Tumblr @floraobsidian


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst ahead.

Time passes.

It’s one of those slower days on base, especially for Jania. She has a routine, and things to keep her busy, but her shift working down in inventory is over for the day and the General has been catching up on what she has missed in her most recent absence, gone away to Hosnia to try and convince the government of the threat of the First Order. Jania sits in the hangar bay, up on a catwalk overlooking the ships below, her legs swinging idly in the air, her fingers sticky from slices of jogan fruit----- and she feels it, all the more painful for its lack in the moments leading up to it.

It isn’t pain, not quite, not at first; it’s Csilla, burning, and that unnameable kind of horror rising up in her chest and choking her, and the world shrinking down to nothing but. A slice of jogan fruit falls from numb fingers to drip through the grating.

Then, the pain. Csilla, burning. A building she does not know, and---

When she can think enough to move, to see, she staggers off in a run. She has to find the General.

* * *

There is a courtyard turned to rubble and flames licking out the windows of a wide stone temple, the trees and the grasses crumbling into cinders and ash---- fire, spreading, and the bodies of children lying broken and in pieces. The Knights of Ren flee in the safety of the shadows with one more added to their number, and in the middle of it all, one lone figure crumples to the ground.

Leia is not there, but she sees it. Feels it.

All of it.

* * *

Jania remembers enough to knock, at least, but she doesn’t wait to hear an answer.

The General is sitting gray-faced at her desk. The holo of her family flickers on one of the shelves behind her. She doesn’t look up. There isn’t any kind of double image when Jania looks at her, just a slack expression and too much pain in her wide brown eyes-- “Ma’am,” she says, and, “General?” but neither garners a response.

Her world feels off-kilter. Something is wrong. She doesn’t understand; she only _knows_.

“General,” she says, again, and takes a hesitant step forwards. She has never seen-- the General isn’t _like_ this. Csilla is burning. The world ripped out from underfoot, and everything so… _empty_. “I felt… terrible pain. Your pain. Ma’am-- Leia. What… happened?”

Watching her pull herself together is something painful and awe-inspiring both. She straightens, slow, and the shutters fall down across her features into something cold and held together through sheer strength of will. Her eyes are dark and fathomless. She folds her shaking hands in front of her, on the desk, and says:

“The Jedi have fallen again.”

Her voice is quiet. It doesn’t break. But it is stretched and tired and old.

“Jania. Find… find Amilyn for me, please. Tell her to come here. I need to make a comm call.”

There wasn’t a damned thing that anyone could have said to her as she crowded onto a refugee ship with hundreds of strangers, wandering aimlessly across the galaxy in search of things she couldn’t even put a name to, that would have made things better. Not a damned thing that anyone could have done.

So Jania doesn’t try, though something in her aches to. She steps back out with the world still knocked off-kilter, and lets the door slide shut again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading. For more writerly things, you can come find me on Tumblr @floraobsidian


End file.
